The Harmony Silk Factory. Tash Aw

Little by little, Tiger’s memory began to lose its imprint of his wife and baby daughter until, truly, they ceased to exist in his world.

      All that had happened a long time before Johnny showed up at his shop. Tiger’s life had long since become settled. His business had been flourishing for many years and now he began to sink more and more into the comfort of his home, a modestly sized but comparatively luxurious stone-and-teak house on the outskirts of the little town. He filled it with exotic furniture – Portuguese chairs from Melaka, English pine tables treated with wax to protect against the humidity, painted chests of drawers from ‘Northern Europe’. He had a formidable collection of books too. Marxist texts in Chinese, mainly, but also a number of English-language books, including a small collection of Dornford Yates novels.

      In his spacious garden there was a small orchard. He tended to his fruit trees with great care. He especially loved the mango trees for their dark tongue-shaped leaves, which kept a thick shade all year round. Of all the fruits, however, he loved the rambutan best, and the ones he grew were considered particularly fine: deep red in colour and not too hairy. He took these down to the market where he sold them wholesale. The few cents he made from this gave him as much pleasure as the hundreds of dollars he made each month from trading textiles and clothing, and so he began to devote more time to his garden. He pruned the trees so that their shapes would become more attractive and their new branches more sturdy; he agonised over which trees to use for grafting new stock; he tied paper bags over the best fruit to protect them from flying foxes and insects.

      For Tiger, it turned out to be perfect timing that, just then, a strong, hungry-looking young man came asking for work at the Tiger Brand Trading Company.

      When Johnny first arrived in town, he did what he always did. He drifted into the nearest coffee shop and had a glass of iced coffee and a slice of bread with condensed milk. He asked the shopkeeper for work – there wasn’t any. Coffee shops were usually poor sources of work, for they were almost always small enough to be run by the members of a single family. Out on the street, he stopped a few people and asked them where they thought he might find work. All of them echoed what the coffee shopkeeper had told him: ‘Tiger Tan’s well-known shop,’ they said, pointing at a large shophouse in the middle of a terrace on the main street. It was a busy-looking place which seemed to be full of expensive, high-quality merchandise. He realised, as he approached the shop, that fine red dust had settled all over his clothes during his three-hour journey from Tanjung Malim.

      ‘I’m looking for work,’ he said to a girl unloading fat bales of cotton from a lorry. The girl jerked her chin in the direction of the shop. ‘Ask boss,’ she said.

      Johnny hesitated before going in. The shop smelled clean and dustless. There were many customers inside, and there was laughter and a rich hum of voices, punctuated with the click-clack of an abacus.

      ‘Yellow shirt, over there,’ the girl said as she pushed past Johnny.

      Johnny looked over to a darkened corner. A neatly dressed man sat quietly in front of a pile of papers and a small money box. He had kicked off his shoes and was sitting with one ankle resting on the knee of another. Every few seconds he lifted his chin and fanned himself with a sheaf of papers. His hair was combed and brilliantined.

      ‘I want work,’ Johnny said simply. ‘I am a labourer.’

      Tiger looked at him hard, assessing him quickly. After all these years he had become a sharp judge of character. It was well known that Tiger could see things in you that you might not have realised yourself.

      ‘What’s your name?’ he asked Johnny.

      ‘Lim.’

      ‘Where are you from?’

      ‘Nowhere.’

      ‘What do you mean, nowhere? Everyone comes from somewhere.’

      ‘I mean, I don’t know.’

      ‘OK – where have you just arrived from?’

      ‘Tanjung Malim.’

      ‘Before that?’

      ‘Grik – and before that Kampung Koh, Teluk Anson, Batu Gajah, Taiping.’

      ‘That’s a lot of places for a kid like you,’ Tiger said. This boy looked perfectly ordinary to him – no distinguishing physical features, nothing unusual in his behaviour. He could have been any one of the young drifters who turned up at the shop from time to time. And yet there was something curious about this particular one, something which, unusually, Tiger could not put his finger on. ‘Tea?’ he said, offering Johnny a chair.

      Johnny sat down, his baggy shorts pulling back slightly to reveal hard gnarled knees criss-crossed with scars.

      ‘Of all the jobs you did,’ continued Tiger, ‘which one did you work at the longest?’

      ‘Yeo’s plantation.’

      ‘Near Taiping?’

      ‘Yes.’

      ‘Yeo’s pineapple plantation, right? The boss is Big-Eye Chew – that one?’

      Johnny nodded.

      A small smile wrinkled Tiger’s eyes. ‘Why did you like it?’

      ‘I liked the other workers,’ Johnny said, looking at his reddened, dust-covered canvas shoes. ‘I liked the way they lived. Together. The bosses too.’

      ‘I know that camp well.’

      ‘The workers there were like me. But I couldn’t stay. I had to go.’

      ‘Why?’

      ‘I had done bad things, people said.’

      ‘Sometimes that happens.’

      Johnny cleared his throat. Tiger poured more tea.

      ‘What are you good at?’

      ‘Everything,’ Johnny said, ‘except machines.’

      Johnny proved to be one of the most diligent employees ever to have worked at the Tiger Brand Trading Company. He began by doing what the other casual workers did – packing, loading, storing, sorting. Back-breaking work. But Johnny was not like the other illiterate workers. He observed and he learned. Soon, he knew the names of all the different textiles he handled, and how they were made. He learned to tell the difference between chintz and cretonne, Chinese silk and Thai silk, serge and gabardine. He especially liked the printed patterns of milkmaids and cowsheds on the imitation French cotton made in Singapore. But more than anything, he loved the batik and the gold-woven songket which were delivered to the shop by the old cataract-eyed Malay women who had made them, here in the valley.

      ‘Put them on the last shelf, over there,’ Tiger snorted, pointing to a recess in the farthest corner of the shop, every time a new supply was delivered. ‘Low-grade rubbish.’ Compared to the imported foreign material, it was true that the batik was rough. The dyes were uneven and the patterns, traced out by hand, were never consistent. The colours faded quickly even on the best ones, leaving only a ghostly impression of the original shades. But Johnny liked the irregular patterns. He must have, because later in his life, when he could afford to wear anything he wanted, he would always wear batik for special occasions such as Chinese New Year or Ching Ming. They were his lucky shirts too. He would wear them if one of his horses was running in a big race in Ipoh, and sometimes, if he had to put on a jacket and tie, he would wear a lucky batik shirt under his starched white shirt, even though it made him hot and sweaty. He had red ones, blue ones and green ones. The blues were my favourite. From far away, when he wasn’t looking, I used to trace the outlines of the patterns with my eyes. Brown dappled shapes stretched like sinews, swimming in the deep pools of the blue background. On his back these shadows danced and shifted quietly – hiding, folding over, tumbling across one another.

      In Tiger’s shop, however, batik was considered second-rate, hardly worth selling. You didn’t go to Tiger Tan if you wanted to buy ordinary material